


You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone

by JessJesstheBest



Series: Lesbian Ghosts [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: After the case closes, Castiel is so done with Dean's shit, Dean Winchester and Feelings, Dean is a fatass, Epilogue, M/M, POV Outsider, Present Tense, dean is oblivious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 02:08:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4416938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessJesstheBest/pseuds/JessJesstheBest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Mona moves on, Dean tries his best to as well. He comes to Dezi for help. And also baked goods. (Epilogue to Hold Me Haunt You)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone

Desiree slides the upside-down red chippy brownies out of the oven and puts the tray on the stove to cool. She takes off her oven mitts and brushes her hands off in satisfaction. That’s it. She’s baked every recipe she knows. It’s only been four days since Marcus and those huge guys swung by and freaked her out with their questions and she’s exhausted her entire repertoire.

Dezi starts cleaning up, reflecting on what she should do with all of these desserts. Upside-down red chippy brownies aren’t even a thing. She just invented them one day when she was halfway through making chocolate velvet cupcakes when she realized she had completely the wrong ingredients. So she started making chocolate-chip brownies and realized she had used all her butter for the cupcakes. It was Mona that suggested she mix them together. Desiree did just that, lining the bottom of the pan with cream cheese, and the end result was delicious.

She pauses in her dishwashing, taking a moment to smile and run her hands through the warm water. Mona really was very sweet. Dezi hates to be the cliche of ‘I wish I could have gotten to know her better’, but well, she didn’t really have much of a choice. She didn’t know Mona very well and even before she died, Dezi had wanted to get to know her better. That damn crash robbed her just as much as it had robbed Mona.

Well, maybe not, but the injustice of it all does stand.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s probably Marcus again, he’s been checking in every day since the earthquake. It was really localized and completely fucked up the generator in Dezi’s building but Dezi slept right through it. The good news is that since the earthquake, there have been no problems with the electricity in the apartment. No weird times where the microwave and tv randomly turn on, the lights haven’t been acting up. Even the weird hallucinations Dezi had of things moving on their own stopped. Of course, no one really knew how badly Dezi thought she was losing her mind, but the relief that it’s over is substantial.

The knock sounds again.

“I’m coming, you geek, let me dry my hands!”

Dezi’s laughing as she opens the door but she stops immediately when she sees that it is not, in fact, Marcus.

“Uhm, Dean right?”

Dean ducks his head and smiled a bit, charming. Very charming. But he’s shuffling from foot to foot.

“Yeah, Dezi, hi. Sorry to bug you like this.”

Dezi just stands there, wondering what he’s doing there.

Dean waits as Dezi stares, He awkwardly clears his throat. “You, uh, mind if I come in?”

Dezi snaps her head back, shaking it off. She steps back t let him through the doorway. “Yeah, oh my God, sorry yeah”

Dean gratefully nods his head and steps in, his large frame ambling through the narrow hallway to the kitchen. Dean is by no means as big as his brother, but by normal human measures, he’s still massive. Without the looming form of Sam, Dean actually has quite the impressive build. Tall, definitely taller than Marcus, and broad shoulders above a well muscled chest and torso. It’s hard to tell how well muscled given all of the baggy shirts but it’s definitely nothing to sneeze at.

Dezi follows him and when she sees him, once again, eyeing the pastries, she encourages him to take some.

“You sure you don’t mind?” The question is clearly a pleasantry as Dean is already taking one of everything Dezi’s counter has to offer.

“No, please. I baked way too much, I don’t even know what to do with all of it.”

Dean grins and shoves an entire brownie in his mouth. She laughs, startled at his brusqueness. “I wasn’t sure,” Dean starts, half of a brownie still in his mouth. He swallows before he continues, “I thought maybe you were cooking for a bake sale or something. There’s just so much.” He pauses looking over the rest of his options. “Why did you bake so much?” he asks, absently.

Dezi shrugs. “I don’t know, I bake a lot when I’m stressed. And you know, with the earthquake a couple days ago and, you know, Mona,” she shrugs again, looking at the floor.

Dean’s silent at that, literally chewing it over with one of Dezi’s home-made whoopie pies. He takes a bite of chocolate croissant and moans. “This is some good shit!” He winces as she laughs, swallowing again before apologizing. “Sorry, Sam says I need to work on my manners around women.”

She waved him off. “Don’t even worry about it; you remind me a lot of Marcus.” Dean nods and shoves more baked goods in his mouth.

“Not that I don’t love having my own human compost bin,” Dean laughs around a muffin. “why are you here?”

Dean looks back at her, eyes wide, as if he’d hoped she’d forget to ask. He swallows thickly, grimacing at the lump that makes it’s way down his throat. He shuffles his feet again and doesn’t make eye-contact. “You know,” he glances at her then quickly away again, “just checking in again. Still have cold spots?”

She tilts her head. “No… no cold spots. It’s a good thing the wiring is fixed, too. I actually have to use my A/C now.”

Dean nods like that’s exactly what he expected her to say. “Good, good.” He puts down the several cakes and things he’s still holding and wipes his hands on his jeans. “That’s really good.”

“Dean…?”

Dean sighs, largely and blusteringly, deflating his lungs completely. “It’s actually about Mona again.”

Dezi scrunches her brow. “Look, Dean, she was a childhood friend so I get that you’re grieving, but I told you, I didn’t really know her. If you need a grief counselor-”

“No, no, it’s not that. It’s just, um,” He takes a deep, fortifying breath and squares his shoulders before letting it out. “She loved you. Like, really loved, romantically and everything. And I just,” He shuffles a bit. “I kind of feel like I owe it to her to make sure you knew that.”

All of the air whooshes out of her. “What?” it’s a whisper, “She- how do you know?”

Dean rubs the back of his neck. “She, uh, she told me.”

Her head jerks back again, unbalanced again in the span of 30 seconds. “I thought you hadn’t heard from her in years.”

“Yes! Well yeah, I mean I hadn’t, but she left me a letter, and I, uh, found it in her apartment.”

“Why would she write you a letter if you haven’t seen her in years? And how did you know to look for it? How did you even get in there?” She stops, gaping at Dean. “Did you break in to a dead girl’s apartment on the off chance she left you something?”

“No! Fuck, no. Ugh, I fucked up. No wait!” He caught Dezi’s arm as she turned to storm away. “Okay, I lied, she didn’t leave me a letter. I, um,” Dean’s eyes dart around. “I did talk to her recently, fuck knows why she decided to pour her heart out to me, but she did tell me. She, uh, she just didn’t really want me spreading it around. That we talked.”

Dezi jerked her arm free and Dean held up his hands in surrender. She scrutinized him through narrowed lids. His stance was open but his face was guarded, his chin just a little too set and his brow just a little too low. It was his eyes, though. He was desperate for her to believe him.

“Okay…” He relaxed a little. “I don’t know why you’re lying to me.” He moved to jump in again but she stopped him. “I do believe, though, that she wouldn’t have wanted you telling me about this. So why are you?”

Dean straightened up and sucked his lips into his mouth, chewing on them for a bit before blowing them back out, dramatically. “Can we sit down? I don’t think I can talk about this standing.”

Dezi still wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear this. Her immediate reaction when she heard Mona had been in love with her, after shock and surprise, was relief. Well relief and sadness but the relief was surprising. Why was she relieved? Not because Mona had loved her but because she was dead? That didn’t sound very good.

She gestures Dean towards the sitting room, where they’d sat the last time Dean had visited, asking her those weird questions about Mona. He slumps away, considerably less large and menacing when he’s hunched over nervous like that, hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor.

Dezi sinks into into her favorite chair and Dean takes the seat to her left on the love-seat. She expected him to take the chair opposite her but maybe he sacrificed the added distance so he wouldn’t be obligated to look at her. She filed it away in the column of ‘weird’ she’d started since Dean arrived.

They’re both quiet. Desiree picks at the fabric of her shorts and Dean’s hands twitch in his lap as he studies his nails, critically. Dean’s the one with a problem, Dezi reasons, so he should be the one to start. No reason for her to pick, he’ll talk when he’s ready.

And he does.

“You get why she wouldn’t want to freak you out or anything, right? I mean, I know it’s not the fifties or sixties anymore but there’s a little more risk involved when you’re sending a valentine to a chick when you’re a chick, even more with dudes. I mean, uh,” He coughs and rubs his chin, rolling his neck in discomfort. “Was there, uh, was there any reason she might have thought you might not have reciprocated? Do you give off like non-lesbianic vibes or something?”

“Well,” Dezi pauses, not sure if she should continue. “I mean I should, you know, give off those vibes. I’m straight.”

Dean’s face falls a little at that. Another tick in the weird column.

“Yeah, but I mean a person could spend their whole life thinking they’re straight, ya know? Even if you have the occasional fixation on a new celebrity or tv show character or something, you could still love… dick or whatever. But then you find out someone cares about you in, you know, that way, and even if you’ve never been into… chicks before….” He trails off, allowing Dezi to fill in the rest.

“Right, no,” She nods, brow scrunched, “I’m fully aware of sexual fluidity and I’ve always been open to explore any new… fixations I might encounter but, you know, I’ve never really felt that.” She shakes her head. “God, I feel like such an asshole. She was always so nice, you know?”

Dean is also shaking his head. Angrily. “Yeah,” he snaps, “she was nice.”

“Whoa, sparky, how are you going to be pissed at me for something I didn’t even know she wanted me to reciprocate?”

“Well what if she had told you?” he shoots back, “What if she’d made herself all vulnerable and given herself hope and then you’d leave her out to dry. You could have killed her just as badly as that crash killed her.”

Dezi’s head snaps back as if he’d slap her. “I wouldn’t-” She shakes it off and tries again. “She didn’t even know me. We weren’t friends. We barely spoke. She may have been infatuated with me or something and if she let me know I would have let her down easy but then maybe we could have at least been friends. Then I wouldn’t be left with this guilt and she wouldn’t have been left wondering.”

“And what if you were friends? Huh? What if you did get close and she still loved you. What if she loved the dumb things you did or the way you tilt your head or your weird obsession with humanity?”

Now Dezi was really confused.

“What are you-?”

Another knock on the door.

Dezi looks down the hall towards the sound and when she looks back at Dean his face is ducked and guarded.

“Alright, well whatever issue you’re having I’m not really sure it’s with me.” Dean sets his jaw and looks out the window. HIs hands work furiously over the thighs of his jeans. “Try and calm down. Eat a cookie. I’m gonna get the door.”

She leaves him to his brooding and puts on a fake smile to greet Marcus. Because it has to be Marcus this time, there’s no one else she knows who would show up without calling first.

But no, as she opens the door and her fake smile falls into a polite frown, it’s not Marcus who stares intently back.

“I’m looking for Dean Winchester.” His voice is gruff like he’d been deprived of water for ten years. “His brother told me he would be here. He also told me that knocking was more polite than ‘popping in’ to find him myself.” He’s quite tall, not as tall as Dean or Sam, but taller than Dezi and at least as tall as Marcus. He searches behind her into her apartment without even having to lean to either side. It looks as if he’s barely restraining himself from barrelling past her to find Dean. “Do you mind if I come inside?”

“Sure,” she answers. It’s not as if she could have stopped him anyway, if she’d said no.

She barely stays ahead of him, his long legs carrying him with purposeful stride, as she leads him into the sitting room while Dean sits, still brooding, with his back to the door.

The man doesn’t stop until he’s directly in front of Dean, his trench coat almost brushing the top of Dean’s head where it’s ducked. Even then Dean doesn’t look up until the man’s graveling voice says “Hello, Dean.”

“Cas!” Dean bolts to standing and, with the man so close to him, he teeters backwards and nearly falls over the arm of the sofa. “What, uh, how did you-”

“Your brother was concerned. He said you’ve been ‘sulking’” he actually does the airquotes, “since we rid this building of that ghost.”

“Ghost?” Dezi interjects, her weird column lighting up with all kinds of bells and whistles. “That’s a euphemism, right? For Mona?”

“What?” Dean looks at her as if just remembering she’s there. “No, well yeah, I mean-”

“A ghost meaning an imprinted soul left on the living plane after the mortal flesh suffers death. But yes, I did mean Mona.”

“Cas-”

“Dean, I-”

“Whoa!” Dezi has to yell to be heard over them. “Dean I don’t know who this is, hell, I don’t even know who you are but I think you should leave.”

“Dezi-”

“NO! You come into my apartment talking about ghosts and how Mona actually loved me and-”

“You told her.”

The man, Castiel’s voice is completely inflectionless. Like he’s indicating a spot on a wall. But Dean still flinches.

“Hey, man, you’re the one who thought Mona should have told her.”

“Yes, I thought Mona should have told her while she was alive so they could have potentially had a life together. What good will it bring to give Desiree this burden now?”

“Well, you’re a little late because she’s not burdened. She never would have gone for Mona anyway.”

“What?” Cas turns his gaze from Dean back to Dezi and again she feels as if she’s been put under a microscope or an MRi or something as equally focused and invasively revealing.

“No okay, listen,” Dezi doesn’t know why she’s  rushing to defend herself, they’re in her goddamn house, but the eyes are off-putting. “I’m not thrilled that I know now but it would have been good to know while she was alive.”

“You would have just sent her out on her ass!” Dean shouts.

“No!” Dezi shouts back. “She didn’t love me! If she had bothered getting to know me she would have seen that!”

“You don’t know that!”Dean pulls out of Cas’s space to start pacing. “You could spend years getting to know someone and try and hide how they’re making you feel but the more time you spend the deeper you get and then maybe it’s too late and maybe they don’t feel the same and-”

“Dean what the hell are you talking about?” She screams. Then, in a softer voice, “Whatever you said about being Mona’s friend back in the day, I don’t think you knew either of us well enough to be this upset. So what are you doing here?”

“Yes, Dean, what are we doing here?” And Cas’s voice is softer than Dezi’s.

Dean glances at him once and then looks anywhere but at either of them, eyes finally settling on the coffee table. He settles back on the love-seat and rests his elbows on his knees. “Just pretend it’s like this:” he starts, wringing his hands, “when you first meet you’re not friends. But then you are. You help each other out sometimes and talk to each other and go through a lot of shit together.” He glances up at Dezi and then looks quickly back down. “You never really show interest in anyone the entire time you know her and you know she… gets around but only with dudes so you have no reason to think she’s into you. But eventually she stops hooking up and she misses you when you’re not there but she can’t tell you that. Can’t tell you anything about what she’s been thinking and she thinks,” Dean takes a deep breath. And another. And another. “She thinks she might be in love with you.” He finally looks up at Dezi, straight in the eye. “After all that, after all the shit, even if it meant losing your best friend, would you still want her to tell you?”

“Yes.”

Dezi means to say it. She’s going to. But then the man to her right says it first.

Dean’s head snaps around. His eyes searching and desperate, as if not believing it was Cas that answered.

“Cas?”

“It’s unwise to withhold information like that. Unwise to assume that feelings only go one way.”

And Dezi understands.

She steps back, not wanting to intrude on the moment but unwilling to take her eyes off of the two men. They were practical strangers, after all.

“And what if it’s a pretty safe assumption that the feelings were one way?” Dean challenges. “What if she has it on good authority that Dezi can’t have feelings. It’s against her angel genetics?”

“Then, to quote a dear, crotchety friend: to assume it to make an ass out of you and me.” Dean chuckles. “Angels fall for all kinds of reasons, Dean, feelings one of them. And she knows the reason why this angel fell.”

Angels? Ghosts? Desiree is really trying to stay out of it and let them have their moment but-

“You never said that in a good way, though, Cas.” Dean smiles sadly. “It’s always been ‘I gave up everything, all of it, for you’ when you were beating my ass in an alley.”

“You try giving up millennia of ingrained loyalty to an absent God because you fell in love with some punk with a penchant for self-sacrifice and not be a little bitter about it.”

Again, it’s said with no inflection, but for whatever reason Dean starts laughing. Laughing and crying and lunging himself at the weird, gruff, trench-coated man.

Dezi only catches a glimpse of a warm, loving embrace before they disappear, literally, before her eyes.

“What- Dean?”

She walks to where they were standing and reaches a hand out only to clutch at empty air.

“Wha- how-” She circles the living room several times, goes to the kitchen where Dean left his half eaten baked goods, she even stoops to look under the coffee table and they’re no where.

She reaches for her phone and dials, dazed.

It’s only after two rings that Marcus picks up. “Hello?”

“Marcus what the hell did you bring into my house?”

 

 


End file.
